How appropriate that a notorious race-hustler and renowned anti-Semite will be the keynote speaker at the annual banquet of a terrorist front group that bills itself as the nation’s largest Muslim advocacy organization.

And what do they have in common? Shamefully, both are tight with the Obama Administration and wield tremendous influence in the government’s civil rights matters. We’re talking about Al Sharpton and the U.S.-based Hamas branch known as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).

Later this month Sharpton, who has made the Obama Department of Justice (DOJ) his lapdog, will deliver the keynote address at CAIR’s annual shindig in Virginia. In its announcement, CAIR laughably refers to Sharpton as a “civil rights icon,” one of the “nation’s most respected civil rights leaders” and a “life-long advocate for social justice.”

Sharpton and CAIR will take the opportunity to draw parallels between the current challenges faced by Muslims in the U.S. today and those faced by other minority communities throughout the nation’s history. After all, the CAIR statement says Sharpton has “been praised by President Obama as the voice of the voiceless and a champion for the downtrodden.”

Conveniently omitted from the press release is Sharpton’s shameful history, the fact that he’s a dangerous individual whose malicious rhetoric has led to serious violence and hatred of white people, especially Jews. Sharpton and his “community group,” National Action Network, were behind the deadly Harlem riots intended to drive Jewish businesses out of the area in the mid 1990s.

One of Sharpton’s picketers, an ex-con with an extensive criminal record, walked into a Jewish-owned clothing store with a gun, ordered all the black customers to leave and poured paint thinner throughout the store. He then set the place on fire, killing eight people. The whole thing started to protest the eviction of a black merchant subletting from the Jewish store owner who simply needed the space to expand his own business.

Sharpton made it a racial issue, created a “Buy Black” committee and rounded up troops to hit the streets. Jewish store owners were referred to as “crackers” and Sharpton proudly offered media sound bites that should still haunt him, but clearly don’t. Here are some excerpts: “We will not stand by and allow them to move this brother so some white interloper can expand his business on 125th Street…There is a systematic and methodical strategy to eliminate our people from doing business on 125th Street….[O]ne of our brothers…is now being threatened.”

CAIR is an Islamic group that raises money for Hamas and was a co-conspirator in a federal terror-finance trial. It was founded in 1994 by three Middle Eastern extremists (Omar Ahmad, Nihad Awad and Rafeeq Jaber) who ran the American propaganda wing of Hamas, known then as the Islamic Association for Palestine. CAIR has extensive links to foreign and domestic Islamists, was a co-conspirator in a federal terror-finance case involving the Hamas front group Holy Land Foundation and is largely funded by Islamic terrorist-supporting countries. Read more in a 2007 Judicial Watch special report.

Regardless, the Obama Administration is tight with CAIR. In fact, a few months ago a news report revealed that President Obama’s deputies are holding hundreds of closed-door meetings with CAIR. The meetings are held so that government departments and agencies can discuss a “range of issues,” with CAIR, according to a White House director quoted in the story.

It’s bad enough that the Obama DOJ takes orders from Sharpton. Earlier this year Sharpton demanded the DOJ investigate a state matter involving the shooting of a black Florida teenager who had been suspended from school. It was a local case to be handled by authorities in the area where the incident occurred and White House Press Secretary Jay Carney made the administration’s intentions clear: “obviously we’re not going to wade into a local law enforcement matter.” A day later the feds took over at Sharpton’s request.